Opinion: Mitt Romney doesn’t fit in

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More than a decade has passed since Mitt Romney lost political support during his failed 2012 presidential campaign for boasting about having “binders full of women” suitable for government appointments and writing off the “47% of Americans” who pay no federal income tax.

But his remark about Russia being America’s “number one geopolitical foe” — which was widely ridiculed at the time — now seems prescient in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine.

In the past few years, the senator from Utah has earned a reputation for being a rare, candid voice in Washington, willing to buck his party. He was the lone Republican who voted to remove President Donald Trump from office in his first impeachment trial and one of seven to do so in Trump’s second impeachment.

Minutes before the State of the Union speech Tuesday, Romney encountered the scandal-ridden Republican Rep. George Santos on the House floor and told him what many of the New York congressman’s constituents — and others around the country — are saying: “You don’t belong here.” (Santos told reporters afterward: “It wasn’t very Mormon of him.”)

Even more tellingly, Romney broke with his party’s stance on China’s spy balloon. After a closed-door briefing by administration officials Thursday, Romney told reporters, “I believe that the administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies, acted skillfully and with care,” and said he agreed with their decision to wait to shoot down the balloon until it moved over the Atlantic Ocean, off the Carolinas.

House Republicans, who were initially planning a resolution condemning the Biden administration for not bringing down the balloon sooner, switched the wording to condemn the government of China for sending the craft over US territory in the first place.

It passed 419-0, a small act of bipartisanship only two days after a group of House Republicans heckled President Joe Biden as he was addressing both houses in his annual speech. There are not a lot of Romneys — or indeed any — in the ranks of the extreme GOPers who bucked their own House Speaker’s shushing to shout their displeasure at Biden’s remarks.

“Some members of the Republican caucus seemed keen to highlight the distinctions between the thoughtful, unity-emphasizing Biden and their own party’s shameful descent,” wrote Jill Filipovic. “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, among others, repeatedly booed and yelled throughout the speech; when he introduced the parents of Tyre Nichols, who was last month fatally beaten by Memphis police officers, and the Ukrainian ambassador, she stayed seated. That perhaps says more than Biden ever could.”

SE Cupp called McCarthy’s “shushing” a “surprisingly gallant act of leadership from someone who has aligned himself with former President Donald Trump, voted to overturn the 2020 election results and packed the House Oversight Committee with election deniers.”

“Will he continue to ‘shush’ the extremist, conspiratorial and ‘Never Biden’ wing of his party — whom he has empowered and elevated — as they act out and get in the way of his agenda, which might even include working with Biden from time to time?”

Geoff Duncan, a Republican who formerly served as Georgia’s lieutenant governor, wrote that “neither the southern border nor inflation received much attention from the president — despite both issues being of importance to voters. Neither did the Chinese spy balloon, whose coast-to-coast journey undermines Biden’s tough talk toward Chinese President Xi Jinping.”

Biden “was feisty, full of energy, marshaled his arguments effectively and even batted back Republican catcalls with good humor,” observed David Gergen. “By the end of the evening, he looked like a boxer who can’t wait to get into the ring again.”

“But he now faces an even sterner test: Did he actually move the needle? Among presidents of the recent past, a public appearance as powerful as this one could shake up politics. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan each had the capacity to change minds when they held a microphone.”

The president’s “discussion of ‘the talk’ that Black parents give to their children about how to safely interact with police officers was the most moving part of his speech,” wrote former Rep. Mondaire Jones, a Democrat.

“Still, it was political malpractice for him not to explicitly call for Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The family of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who was fatally beaten by Memphis police officers last month, deserved to hear it.”

Raul Reyes noted that “Biden smartly aligned himself with populist issues, like making wealthy corporations pay their fair share of taxes and proposing that all federal infrastructure projects use American-made materials.”

The 80-year-old president’s vision was decidedly blue-collar — and 20th century — in its aim to rebuild America’s manufacturing base and reduce the reliance on trade with the rest of the world.

But, as Julian Zelizer pointed out, “times have changed and Biden has a tough road ahead. While the president offered a robust vision of how federal investment has and could create jobs in key sectors such as the semi-conductor industry and infrastructure, the kinds of manufacturing jobs that were at the heart of federal investment between the 1930s and 1960s have vastly diminished and are not likely to return.”

“Biden needs to acknowledge how his economic populism will address the industries of the 2020s rather than those of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Biden’s success in 2020 owed a lot to the contrast with the chaos and extremism of the Trump administration, Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva wrote. The outbursts by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her colleagues allow Biden to surf the same wave now. “By keeping the hostility factor high, the GOP is also paving the way for Biden to reuse in 2024 one of his stickiest and most effective campaign messages from 2020: that the election is nothing short of a battle for the ‘soul of the nation.’ Thanks to the new breed of attention-seeking, far-right Republicans, Biden gets to go back to that well regardless of whether Trump is his opponent or not.”

The president turned the heckling to his advantage by getting Republicans to deny any intention of cutting Social Security or Medicare. “You can say Mr. Biden fibbed, misled and exaggerated, and you wouldn’t be wrong,” Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “but in rope-a-doping Republicans on Medicare and Social Security he showed real mastery.”

In “a scathing rebuke” to Biden’s speech that served as the GOP’s official reply, “Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it’s time for a new generation of Republican leadership,” Alice Stewart noted.

“At 40, Sanders is the youngest governor in the country. She spoke of Biden as the oldest president in American history, and at 80-years-old, she said, he is simply ‘unfit to serve as commander in chief.’”

Left unsaid was that Trump, Sanders’ former boss, would be 78 by Election Day, 2024 — and he is running for the presidency again.

Patrick T. Brown spoke for a lot of Americans when he pleaded for something other than a Biden-Trump rematch: “A 2024 presidential election that features another slugfest between two elderly leaders rather than a scrappy fight between up-and-coming politicians with energy and enthusiasm would be doing the nation a disservice.”

“New polling suggests a growing desire for new faces. 58% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters told a Washington Post/ABC News poll they hoped their party nominates someone other than Biden in 2024. According to the poll, 49% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said the same thing about former President Donald Trump.”

For more:

Jennifer Rodgers: Former Manhattan prosecutor has given Trump a gift

John Avlon: Four key moments from Biden’s State of the Union

Twitter roundup: Biden gets feisty, baits Republicans

Dr. Abdurrahman Alomar and his family were jolted awake at 4:17 am Monday in their sixth-floor apartment in Gaziantep, Turkey. A devastating earthquake had struck and they hurried out of the building in their pajamas into snow-filled streets. Taking refuge in their car, away from any buildings, Alomar spoke to CNN Opinion’s Sheena McKenzie about the toll the quake is taking on a region already devastated by war.

Alomar is a pediatrician who works as a senior health adviser with the Syrian American Medical Society, providing medical assistance across the border. “In northwest Syria, we are already suffering from a shortage of supplies, and we are now using the regular inventories in our warehouses,” Alomar said.

“So we are in urgent need of additional support to compensate these supplies for regular operations — and also to be ready for aftershocks and more casualties who may come to our hospitals.”

In the New York Times, Turkish author and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk wrote, “Aid has been dispatched, but the trucks loaded with supplies are stuck for hours on jammed roads hundreds of miles from the affected areas. People who have lost their homes, their families, their loved ones, everything they ever had find that there is nobody doing anything about the fires beginning to break out in their cities. And so they block the path of any official vehicle, policeman or government employee they can find and start to remonstrate. I have never seen our people so angry.”

As of Sunday, the death toll in the quake stood at more than 28,000, with tens of thousands injured.

A year ago, shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, former comedian-turned-president “Volodymyr Zelensky’s popularity ratings were tanking as he battled allegations of unmet campaign promises to tackle endemic corruption,” recalled Michael Bociurkiw.

“Then on February 24, Russia’s total invasion blasted these concerns into the background. Almost overnight, that dark cloud over Zelensky vanished as he defied critics, and miraculously pivoted into the role of heroic wartime president and global symbol of defender of the free world.”

“His popularity ratings surged — and have stayed high ever since — currently hovering at around 84%.”

But corruption is still pervasive in Ukraine, as recent allegations and a new crackdown have shown, and Bociurkiw argued that it’s vital to keep fighting it.

“Zelensky needs to respond to allegations of wrongdoing with the same determination that Ukrainian servicemen have demonstrated on the battlefield.”

“This is an opportunity to create a nation where corruption is not tolerated, and where oligarchs no longer have a free hand to rape and pillage the economy.”

For more:

Anshel Pfeffer: Why Netanyahu is suddenly a lot less friendly with Putin

What would China have done if a US balloon entered its airspace, intelligence analyst Beth Sanner asked.

China would have shot it down “without hesitation, regardless of any risk to Chinese citizens or property.”

“So China’s protestations about the outrageousness of the US shootdown of a spy balloon flying over our sovereign territory seem a little rich, to put it mildly,” Sanner wrote.

“I understand why Americans were alarmed by the balloon,” she added, “but there are much bigger threats posed by China. We should address the shortcomings this incident exposed — including what appears to be gaps in our air defense and detection systems that would have allowed us to shoot such a balloon down before it ever reached US landfall — but political one-upmanship on such a fraught and grave matter as relations with China is dangerous.”

Napoleon’s soldiers used balloons for surveillance in 1794, as did Union soldiers during the US Civil War. Peter Bergen’s father worked on a US Air Force program that sent balloons over the Soviet Union in the 1950s, Bergen wrote.

But there’s newer technology in the form of satellites that can take video, use thermal imagery to detect people moving around at night and “spy on pretty much anything, with a resolution of centimeters,” Bergen noted.

“In other words, the overflight of US territory by China’s balloon is not a national security catastrophe as a bunch of hyperventilating Republican politicians from former President Donald Trump on downward have implied,” Bergen added.

For more:

Dean Obeidallah: Did Trump have his own balloon issue?

Chocolate ice cream for breakfast, a hot dog with mustard and relish for lunch: Those are the reported meal selections of the 82-year-old former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Lots of other lifestyle choices, plus genetics, may enable people to do just fine with such a diet. But CNN Opinion’s Kirsi Goldynia wrote, “As endearing as it is to imagine a politician scarfing down a frank with all the fixings or a bowl of chocolate ice cream, new research is exposing the health impacts of diets like Pelosi’s, high in ultraprocessed foods.”

“Pelosi isn’t an outlier. In the US, a whopping 58% of adults’ daily calories, and 67% of kids’ daily calories, come from ultraprocessed foods, according to cancer epidemiologist Fang Fang Zhang.” A raft of recent studies has demonstrated that consuming ultraprocessed foods increases the risk of cancer and cognitive decline as people age.

Goldynia interviewed Marion Nestle, a nutrition expert and retired professor at New York University. “Studies show that ultraprocessed foods encourage people to eat more calories,” Nestle said, “and the subjects gain weight as a result. So, if you want to do something about obesity, and you want to lose weight, one way to do that would be to eat fewer ultraprocessed foods… If you’re somebody who can’t resist this stuff if you have it in the house, don’t buy it.”

Rosalyn R. Nichols and Ayanna Watkins: Honor Tyre Nichols by reimagining public safety

Sara Stewart: This world-famous sex symbol deserves to be taken seriously

Jill Filipovic: These judges could have blood on their hands

Brian Levin: The head-scratching anomaly at the heart of the Proud Boys

Bruce Schneier: What Peter Thiel and the ‘Pudding Guy’ revealed

Hannah Ryan: I’m embracing the joy in Sam Smith’s kingdom of queer delights

Clay Cane: The Grammys prove that LGBTQ artists are no longer on the sidelines

Jemar Tisby: Black history is more than a month. That’s why DeSantis and those like him are so afraid of it

Rosanna Smart and Andrew R. Morral: Addressing gun violence requires better means of measuring it

AND…

A year after celebrities were paid lavishly to endorse cryptocurrencies in Super Bowl ads, the mood is different. “Crypto winter” set in, and one of the leading companies in the field, FTX, collapsed spectacularly.

Kara Alaimo wrote, “So far this year, brands seem to not be sticking their necks out. In a Doritos ad, paparazzi bombard rapper Jack Harlow with questions about a love triangle. Budweiser’s spot is based on the theory that we’re all connected by six degrees of separation. Serena Williams takes up golf in an ad for Michelob Ultra…”

“One ad that may buck the trend of brands playing it safe this Super Bowl is M&M’S. The company recently claimed to be putting its spokescandies on ‘pause’ after they got caught up in the culture wars. After the green M&M started wearing sneakers instead of heeled boots last year, the company received a wave of criticism. … The brand would be smart to stay woke. The actress Maya Rudolph will appear in a commercial during the game. Hopefully the ad sends a message about the value of diversity and inclusiveness.”

Tom Brady won’t be on the field, following a losing season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and his recent re-retirement announcement. Still, as Gene Seymour wrote, Brady “has been so habitually labeled the greatest quarterback, and — remarkably, by some — as the greatest football player period (!), that the GOAT acronym has, to all intents and purposes, become virtually synonymous with his name.”

On Tuesday, LeBron James broke the career scoring record in the NBA, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “The GOAT chants are building to a fervent pitch around James’s name against those who believe Michael Jordan closed off the GOAT discussion in professional basketball with his six titles with the Chicago Bulls.”

All of the GOAT-talk leaves Seymour cold.

“I don’t begrudge those filling hours at a barber shop or a corner bar arguing about who is or isn’t a GOAT. I’m just asking to leave me out of it. I’m now content to say there are performers in many arenas I feel closest to in spirit because of how they do their work, play their games, sing their songs. They’re likely not all-time greats and have been superseded by newer, younger talent. But they’re great enough for me.”